First it was AT&T and now its Verizon. There are rumblings other carriers might join. It’s not limited to smartphones, but your cable carrier as well. Time Warner and Comcast are reportedly looking into capping their data plans. Some carriers still allow unlimited data in their plans.

Why is Dr. Z concerned?

When we do video communication, we do not use the audio on the phone or the cable, we use the data portion of the phone or internet on cable. When the carriers cap data, this means if we talk more than the cap is allowed (such as 2 GB), we will have to pay extra for more data that we use in order to talk freely. Most audio plans have monthly minutes which can carry over and the minutes are for 300-600-900 minutes. 2GB of data will probably be good for about 10 hours (600 minutes) of video communication, maybe a bit more.

Dr. Z thinks it’s time for consumers to come to the FCC and ask that the carriers treat the deaf and hard of hearing consumers who use video communication to be treated appropriately and be functionally equivalent as the hearing consumers. There is precedent for this–in the TTY days, ATT used to give deaf and hard of hearing users a discount because it took longer to communicate via typing.

Let us keep an eye on those developments and tell the FCC not to limit our video communication because of the data caps!

Dr. Z cares about your communication access.

Disclaimer: Dr. Z is currently the Vice-President of Marketing at CSDVRS, LLC.